THREATS AND RESPONSES: AN OLD TERRORIST

By JOHN F. BURNS

Published: November 8, 2002

BAGHDAD, Iraq—
Seventeen years after terrorists from his Palestinian splinter group shot Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old American Jew from New York, and pushed him, in his wheelchair, into the Mediterranean from the deck of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, the man who calls himself Abu Abbas may be approaching the day when he will finally have to face a day of reckoning with American justice.

After years as a fugitive, interrupted for four years in the 1990's when the Oslo accords allowed him to live unhindered in Gaza, Mr. Abbas, 53, is back in Baghdad, living under the protection of President Saddam Hussein.

But President Bush's threat to invade Iraq in pursuit of a ''regime change'' has now put even this refuge in doubt, and Mr. Abbas has to contemplate the day when American troops might arrive at his door.

Perhaps because of that, or perhaps because the passing years have lent a new perspective on a lifetime's commitment to violence for political ends, Mr. Abbas is now eager to meet with American reporters and explain his past.

The killing of Mr. Klinghoffer, on Oct. 7, 1985, in full view of his wife, Marilyn, was an act that at the time seemed to set a standard for remorselessness among terrorists.

Mr. Abbas is keen to put distance between himself and the Muslim hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks last year, whom he describes as terrorists -- a term he rejects when applied to himself and the others involved in the killing of Mr. Klinghoffer.

In a two-hour interview at the modest two-story villa in the Baghdad suburb of Zeiyunia that serves as headquarters for his Palestine Liberation Front, an offshoot of Yasir Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, Mr. Abbas spoke contemptuously of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

He condemned the attack on the World Trade Center, saying it made no political sense and took thousands of innocent lives.

The essential difference between his group and Al Qaeda, he said, was that in the Achille Lauro operation and later attacks, his group was serving what he described as a limited, historical goal -- the liberation of Palestinians and the recovery of their ''occupied'' lands -- and not the borderless, limitless holy war on America and Israel, and Americans and Jews, declared by Mr. bin Laden.

''That,'' he said, with emphasis, ''is terrorism.''

Asked if he was sorry for what happened to Mr. Klinghoffer, Mr. Abbas seemed to search for words that would express regret but not an apology, and that would equate the Klinghoffer killing with American and Israeli military actions that have caused civilian deaths.

''Of course, it wasn't my fault,'' he said. ''I didn't shoot the man. But he was a civilian, and I ask myself, 'What was his fault?' It is no different whoever the civilian who is killed may be -- whether you drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima or Nagasaki or you kill some innocent person who is walking down a road.''

The difficulty, or impossibility, of making an ethical distinction between between the killing of the World Trade Center victims and the murder of Mr. Klinghoffer, who was a retired businessman, seemed lost on Mr. Abbas, as did the fact that an Italian court has convicted him of murder in the Klinghoffer case.

He faces a life sentence in Italy, and American prosecutors have left open the possibility that a federal indictment for piracy, hostage taking and conspiracy could be revived. It was dropped in the 1990's, partly because of the statute of limitations and partly because Justice Department officials were not sure that their evidence would stand up in an American court.

For the Klinghoffer family, no mollifying statements now seem likely to be of any value.

Reached for comment on Mr. Abbas's statements, Lisa Klinghoffer, one of Mr. Klinghoffer's two daughters, said: ''Abu Abbas was found guilty by an Italian court for the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, and we still hope to see the day when he will be brought to justice. Nothing Abu Abbas says matters.''

Over the years, Mr. Abbas, whose real name is Muhammad Abbas, has given a number of interviews about the case, always maintaining -- against the conclusions of American investigators, who called him the mastermind of the ship hijacking -- that he was innocent in the killing.

He noted that he was not aboard the Achille Lauro during the hijacking, but in Jordan, and that he negotiated the deal in which the hijackers surrendered the ship off the Egyptian coast in return for passage to Mr. Arafat's headquarters, then in Tunis.

The interview was arranged after a reporter for The New York Times had a chance encounter with Mr. Abbas in the lobby of the Rashid Hotel here; later, Mr. Arafat's embassy in Baghdad provided Mr. Abbas's telephone number.

After 24 hours of elusiveness from his Palestinian aides about the location, the interview was conducted behind a wall of security provided by Palestinian men with Kalashnikov rifles and holstered pistols and seemed, for long passages, to be tinged with surrealism.

Nowhere was that more evident than when Mr. Abbas, heavyset, in need of reading glasses and troubled in recent years by a heart ailment, sought to lay out a moral argument that made the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks terrorists, for killing innocent Americans, while sparing himself and his associates the same description.